Top Executive Recruiters Agree There Are Only Three True Job Interview Questions…

According to George Bradt on Forbes.com, all interview questions are trying to find the answers to just three questions:

Can you do the job?

Will you do the job?

Will you fit in?

The first questions – in whatever format it may be asked – is trying to discover your skills.
The second question, is looking to explore your motivation and commitment.
The third question, is looking to understand if they can tolerate having you around.

My advice is that if you are being interviewed, at the end of the interview, when you are asked if you’ve got anything you’d like to add, quickly reflect on these 3 questions. If you don’t feel you’ve sufficiently demonstrated your ability, your motivation and/or your appropriate fit, then you have a chance to add an extra example or describe a clear case to add further support to your performance so far.

On 15 October 2012 I was in Barcelona with Peter Wennström co-presenting the latest in the global series of Healthy Marketing Team FourFactors Masterclasses.

This event was organised with Informa as a special pre-conference event to add extra value for the attendees of World Juice 2012 – ‘The world’s #1 Forum for capitalising on the latest product trends, analysing raw material outlooks and doing business.’

With nearly 50 delegates booked this was [..]

Sam Waterfall on successful emerging market branding.

On Monday 16 July I delivered a FourFactors Marketing Masterclass in Jakarta, Indonesia.

The FourFactors were developed and refined by Peter Wennström and we use them at the Healthy Marketing Team to help our clients to test concepts and to create concepts within the Food, Beverage, Ingredients and Personal Care categories.

This particular Masterclass was delivered to a private audience of Senior Marketers from one company. It’s a fantastic way of ensuring that everyone from the business shares the same view of the marketplace, the consumer and the specific category they are looking to operate within. [..]

Speaking at the Fi Conference: Innovations in Dairy in Amsterdam, July 2012

On 10 July 2012 I was invited as an innovation speaker to present at the Radisson Blu Hotel at the heart of beautiful Amsterdam at the Fi Conference, Innovations in Dairy.

Speaking on how to use consumer insights to improve brands and products, I explained the stages of category development and the importance of timing your innovation with consumer readiness for your new idea.

One of the hardest things for Marketers to achieve is to change someone’s mind. Have you tried changing someone’s mind? A far better, far easier and far more cost effective approach for Marketers is to find an audience who are looking for a story and tell them the story they already believe. That way, when they see your innovation it strikes them with instant appeal as being a solution for their lives that they’ve been looking for all the time!

Instead of resisting your new idea, they are instantly open to its arrival because it comes from their frame of reference and understands their way of seeing the world. In this way, as soon as you know your target, the task of launching and communicating your innovation becomes hugely simplified.

The Radisson Blu Amsterdam - venue for The Fi Innovations in Dairy Conference.

At the Healthy Marketing Team, we use a proprietary innovation model to predict the up-coming opportunities within the categories of food, beverage, ingredients, supplements and personal care. The way we help our clients, who range from the world’s largest multinational corporations to small local and family businesses, is by helping them to predetermine the success of their launch. Not only can we help them to time it and position it correctly, but we help them to fine tune the concepts prior to launch as well – all based on what their target consumer already wants to buy. It’s so logical it’s a wonderfully exciting process to save companies and individuals the pain of launching the wrong product at the wrong time. [..]

One of the things I’m most passionate about is brand honesty. (You can watch a video summary of a talk I gave on “Building Brand Trust”  at a conference in Austria in 2011 here) I believe that brands and their manufacturing companies should act with integrity. Not surface integrity but from the core. Brand values should not be something which are come out of a quick brainstorm, only to be printed in a smart font and filed away in the corporate archive. No. Brand values should be lived by every employee and embodied by every product that reaches the shelves.

But it should go even deeper than that. When I was speaking at a private VIP retreat for a company in Sweden in June I shared four ideas, four Brand Honesty Strategies that I believe will help brands to survive and thrive in under the microscope of consumer scrutiny that pervades all categories today. I’m astounded that companies are still trying to cover up their failures and shortcomings. The smart move is to innovate around them and to communicate both the vulnerability and the regret around mistakes.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, the US author and physician, famously said that “A mind once stretched can never regain its original dimensions.” [..]